This article explains what Subscriber Interests are in Echobox Email, how they are calculated, and where you can view and use them across the platform.
Subscriber Interests help Echobox understand what content individual subscribers — and your audience as a whole — are most likely to engage with. These insights power personalization, analytics, and smarter editorial decisions.
What are Subscriber Interests?
Subscriber Interests represent the topics a subscriber is most likely to click on, based on their historical behavior.
Echobox analyzes which articles each subscriber has clicked in the past and maps those articles to standardized content topics. Over time, this builds an interest profile for each subscriber and an aggregated view of interest across your entire newsletter audience.
Subscriber Interests are used to:
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Understand what content individual subscribers care about
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See which topics perform best across your audience
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Power personalization and optimization features within Echobox
Where can I see Subscriber Interests?
Subscriber Interests are available in two main places:
Subscriber-level view
You can view interests for individual subscribers by navigating to:
Subscribers → Subscriber fields → Interests
This shows the topics that a given subscriber is most likely to engage with, based on their past clicks.
Audience-level analytics
To see what your entire newsletter audience is most interested in, navigate to:
Analytics → Interests
Here you’ll find a visual breakdown (bar chart) of interest categories ranked by engagement across your subscribers.
This is useful for editorial planning, understanding audience preferences, and tracking how interests evolve over time.
How are Subscriber Interests calculated?
Subscriber Interests are calculated using click behavior.
In simple terms:
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Echobox tracks which articles each subscriber clicks on
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Each article is associated with one or more content topics
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Topics that a subscriber clicks on repeatedly become stronger signals of interest
Click-based modeling
For each subscriber:
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Echobox counts how many times they have clicked articles belonging to a given topic
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Only topics with sufficient interaction history are considered meaningful signals
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These interactions are then scored to rank topics by relevance for that subscriber
This ensures that Subscriber Interests reflect demonstrated engagement, not inferred or assumed preferences.
Topics and taxonomy
Subscriber Interests are based on the IAB Content Taxonomy 3.1, an industry-standard classification system for content topics.
This allows Echobox to consistently categorize articles and interests across different publications and content types.
You can access the full taxonomy here.
Example interest topics
Some examples of Subscriber Interests include:
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Attractions
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Amusement and Theme Parks
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Bars & Restaurants
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Pickup Trucks
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Personal Finance
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Healthy Living
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...
Each article can map to multiple topics, allowing for more accurate and nuanced interest profiles.
How are interests used in Echobox?
Subscriber Interests are a foundational signal used by Echobox to improve newsletter performance.
They help power:
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Article selection – choosing articles that align with subscriber preferences
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Article ordering – ranking content so the most relevant items appear higher
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Audience insights – understanding which topics resonate most with your readers
While interests are visible to users for insight and analysis, they also work behind the scenes to support Echobox’s automation and personalization features.
Using Subscriber Interests for targeting and segmentation
Subscriber Interests can also be used to target specific groups of subscribers with dedicated Marketing or editorial emails.
By creating segments based on interests, you can ensure that the right content reaches the subscribers most likely to engage with it.
Creating interest-based segments
You can create a new subscriber segment using Interests as a filter:
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Navigate to Subscribers → Segments
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Create a new segment
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Add a rule using the Interests field
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Select one or more topics (for example: Healthy Living, Home & Garden, or Food & Drink)
This allows you to define a group of subscribers who have demonstrated engagement with a particular topic.
Sending emails to interest-based segments
Once a segment is created, there are two ways to use it:
Option 1: Export and reuse to create a new campaign
You can export the subscriber list, then upload that list into a new Campaign or Marketing send.
Option 2: Send directly to the segment (recommended)
Alternatively, you can simply select the segment when sending an Edition or Marketing email.
This has a key advantage:
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The segment updates automatically as subscriber behavior changes
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New subscribers who develop an interest in the topic will be included
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Subscribers whose interests change will be removed automatically
This makes interest-based segments ideal for ongoing Campaigns or recurring Marketing sends.